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Old Usenet messages and forwarded email can look ugly with all those single or double angle brackets (">"), line breaks, white spaces and in some cases, the email messages has a chain of real email-addresses starting with the address of the original sender.

Sometimes you also want to forward these messages to a friend or just print them for reference but only after cleaning up the message with all the garbage it collected while being passed around various inboxes.

Either you can clean up the message manually by pasting it inside a text editor and using Find & Replace or a smarter option is to get eClear - a freeware that just makes those ugly forwarded messages look good again.

eCleaner can remove HTML code, indents (">>") and word wrap fragmented sentences with a single click. The cleaned message is automatically copied to the clipboard.

There's even an option to remove the email headers from the message to protect email address from landing in the …

He registered a web domain www.abc.com and mapped it to abc.blogspot.com by changing the CNAME record to point to ghs.google.com. The blogger-domain mapping was very smooth but he now wants www.abc.com to point to xyz.blogspot.com instead of abc.blogspot.com

Shuaib deleted the abc.blogspot.com blog to free the domain and then tried to map xyz.blogspot.com to www.abc.com but Blogger is not letting him do that with the error - "Another blog is already hosted at this address"

Though his old blog is deleted from Blogger database, the mapping record probably still exists. It could be a bug in the new Blogger Beta or the cache needs to be cleared up or there is a small chance that someone has hijacked your redirect.

While you can do nothing about it, the issue can be resolved by writing to the Blogger Support as it requires manual intervention.

Looking for a good video editor or movie making software that you can download for free ?

It's only a myth that you need expensive video editors for video editing tasks like adding scrolling texts, subtitles or custom animations - you will find such features even inside free video editors that we discuss here to help you produce video podcasts, home movies and online web video easily.

But before that, do check the installation DVD that came with your handycam or digital camera - most camera vendors like Sony, Canon and Panasonic generally provide a decent video editing software with the camera. If that doesn't help, here's a list of best and free video editing software:

Windows Movie Maker - The best video editing tool for Windows that's absolutely free and chances are you already have it installed on your computer as part of XP SP2. Microsoft Movie Maker has all the basic video editing tools plus a good collection of transitions and video effects.

Google pays users up to $1 for downloading FireFox [via AdSense referrals] and the Google engineers have even written some great extensions for FireFox like the Toolbar, Google Notebook, Browser Sync and Blogger Web Comments.

Google's revenue comes primarily from its advertising programmes and same is the case with Mozilla who earns few hundred millions every year when people surf using FireFox and click on advertisements displayed on search results pages.

At the same time, it's a well known fact that Windows hostsfile and FireFox extensions like Adblock Plus are bad for the Google economy since the more people know about these workarounds, the fewer the ad impressions thereby translating into lower profits for the search company and the associated publishers.

Now this may surprise a lot of people - though Mozilla earns millions from advertising revenue indirectly, they have included Adblock Plus in their list of most recommended add-ons fo…

Tamer Al-Khouli is facing a strange character encoding problem with Firefox 2 and IE 6.0 browser.

Both the web browsers are unable to detect local language webpages (Arabic in his case) and display junk unrecognizable characters instead.

Since the character set cannot be detected automatically, Tamer has to manually select the correct character encoding each time he visits a webpage written in Arabic. He further writes:If I followed a link from that page to another Arabic page, I need to repeat the process and so on ! I tried to solve this by going to Advanced-General-languages in Firefox , and set the Arabic language to the top of of preferrable languages list , but this didn't work.

I tried setting the encoding in IE as Arabic ( not "Auto select" ) .. but this also didn't work . Tamer, most likely the problem is not at your end but with the webpages that you are visiting. The site developers may have failed to include the correct character encoding information in th…

Twitter is a free service for telling your friends (or the whole world) what you're doing right now (and vice-versa). This product is from the same group that developed Blogger and Odeo.

And this service enjoys a huge fan following - Evan Williams, Anil Dash, Robert Scoble, Matthew Mullenweg, Leo Laporte, Niall Kennedy.. you name a person and chances are that he's already a Twitter addict.

Earlier, I was under the impression that to use twitter, one needs to send an SMS text message from a mobile phone number to get it published on the twitter website.

I was so wrong - you can use twitter directly with Gtalk without paying those international SMS sending charges.

Click To PlayWondering where your favorite Office 2003 menu and toolbar commands are located in the new Office 2007 Ribbon interface? Here's some help to get you started.

The Office Online team has created interactive Flash screencasts that show you the location of your favorite Office 2003 commands in the new interface of Microsoft Office 2007.

Once you download the Flash guide from MSFT website, run the executable. Now rest your mouse pointer over any Word 2003 menu or button to learn it's new location in Word 2007. You can even click the mouse to see the corresponding location in Word 2007 GUI.

These guides are also available for Powerpoint 2007 and Excel 2007. Watch the side-by-side comparison video clip above for a sample demo.

Ask this question to any of your blogger friends and they will share a variety of reasons - some do it for sharing opinions, for the love of writing, for money and then there are souls who blog just because everyone around them is blogging.

Finance blogger Ranjan asked Amit Varma the same question and his answer was "Guilt"When I wake up late and log on to my site meter and see that a couple of thousand people have come to my blog while I've sleeping, it makes me feel guilty that I've let them down. So I blog on.That's so true. RSS is yet to go mainstream and a good number of your regular visitors will actually visit the blog website to read the new stories. Using Bloglines or Google Reader is just too geek and they prefer the old-school method of reading websites - type the URL in the address bar and hit go.

And when you build a good reader base who check your site every morning (or several times a d…

Steve Jobs' Apple Keynote Bloopers - It's sometimes OK to make mistakes even on the stage.

Watch this interesting video of Steve Jobs during Apple Keynote - he slips, the Mac freezes, the digital camera refuses to start up .. yet his fans continue to enjoy and laugh at those embarrassing moments..

Rapidshare [both rapidshare.com and rapidshare.de] are one the most visited sites in India according to Alexa India rankings. At the same time, a recent BSA report says that software piracy in India is as high as 72%.

Not sure if we can relate the two figures but Rapidshare does receive fairly significant traffic from India.

The good news for Rapidshare users in India is that they can download / upload data from Rapidshare at better speeds now since the file hosting service has added a new server in India itself (dl30vsnl.rapidshare.com)

Shyam Somanadh has the scoop. He adds that "users who are either on MTNL or Tata Indicom should see considerably faster speeds because of this". Here's the official announcement Rapidshare made few weeks ago:Today we have integrated two new carriers in our network. Now you can download your files via VSNL and GlobalCrossing as well. We hope that you can download files even faster now. Maybe it's time for other file hosting services like…

Adobe has just added a new member to the Photoshop family called the Adobe Photoshop LightRoom 1.0 - but don't get confused with the word "Photoshop" here.

Photoshop LightRoom is no substitute for the ubiquitous Photoshop - Photoshop LightRoom is more for managing large volumes of digital photographs, and Photoshop is for editing the individual images. However, Photoshop LightRoom maybe considered a perfect replacement for Adobe Bridge.

Photoshop LightRoom is not about fixing that red eye from a photograph or quickly changing the color saturation, its more about how to deal efficiently with the thousands of photographs on your hard disk.

Want to get rid of the blogger toolbar in new blogger that just came out of beta ?

If you have shifted your blogspot blog from old blogger to the new blogger beta, you may have noticed that the previous CSS code to remove the blogger navbar will no longer be effective. That's because Google now uses different CSS tags to display the blogger bar. [#navbar-iframe instead of #b-navbar]

Fortunately, hiding the blogger navbar from new blogger is also as simple as the old one. Just add the following lines anywhere in your Blogger template [enclosed by <style> tags] and the blogger banner will be gone forever. #navbar-iframe { height:0px; visibility:hidden; display:none; }Alternatively, if you are using the Classic beta template inside new Blogger beta, search and replace #b-navbar with #navbar-iframe to get rid of the blogger navbar.

While the above beta blogger hack works perfect, here are some alternate solutions for hiding the na…

Microsoft Office 2007 will start shipping this week but even you buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat 8 today, the software won't work with any of the Office 2007 programs including Word, Excel or Outlook.

Infact, Adobe customers will have to wait until the first half of 2007 when Adobe issues a free Acrobat 8 patch [like Acrobat 8.1] to make the PDF software compatible with Office 2007 programs. [hat tip: Navjot]

And there's some bad news for Acrobat 7 users who were planning to upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 - Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and earlier version will not support Office 2007 programs or Office 2007 file formats. You will have to upgrade to Acrobat 8.1 in order to print Office 2007 documents using Acrobat PDF Maker.

The Microsoft Office Save as PDF plugin doesn't support Outlook 2007 so you would need a third-party PDF converter for saving Outlook emails as PDF files. [An upgrade license of Acrobat Professional 8.0 costs in excess of $100]

Dell recently introduced n-Series desktops and laptops that are shipped without any operating system - not even Linux or Free DOS.

If you happen to buy any of these "Open Source" Dell Systems, the first thing you would want to do is install an OS in order to boot the system. [The n Series desktops have a non-formatted hard drive ready for OS installation.]

This news might bring much joy to existing owners of Windows XP/Vista or even Linux fans who love Dell machines but hate shelling out that extra money for the Microsoft OS which they will probably never use.

Last year, facing pressure from US and even Microsoft, China issued an ordinance requiring PC vendors to ship new computers pre-loaded with a legal OS license to prevent Windows piracy.

To circumvent this new law, the Chinese vendors started shipping computers pre-loaded with DOS which is often free and legal OS.

Now with Dell joining the OS-free computer market, all these Naked PC consumers might eventually shift to Dell…

Launchy, the Start Menu for Geeks, has just left the beta school and is looking much better and cooler.

Launchy, a free Windows utility, is more like your Windows Start Menu on steroids - Press the Alt+Space button and start typing the first few character of the program that you want to run - Launchy will guess which program or file you are looking for and will launch it when you hit the enter key.

You can also use Launch to access the icons lying on the desktop, documents, pictures or any file folder on the computer. The concept is similar to Mac Quicksilver or the Google Desktop Search Quick Find bar.

Browse your files/folders: Type in c: and then hit tab, now type in a couple letters of the next directory, and hit tab. (just like command like completion in MS-DOS)

Search the Web: Type google followed by tab and the search terms - Launchy will open the Google results page for you. Also works with MSN, Wikipedia, Yahoo, etc.

Just wanted to share a couple of differences between getting noticed by A-listers vs getting onthe Digg front pages:

Increase in Site Traffic - Digg will flood your blog with new visitors so much so that your web-host may even confuse that new traffic with a DDoS attack. On the other side, the traffic coming from A-list blogs might be disappointing - you may see regular traffic increasing by 1K or 2K but nothing drastic.

Diggers will just Digg - If the Digg flood likes your post, they'll probably increase the Digg count by 1 and leave. The A-list traffic is likely to spread the word by bookmarking to del.icio.us or even blog about the post by adding their own perspective or opinion.

Google recently disabled the Adsense account of John Q. Public for generating invalid or fraudulent clicks. It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that this step was taken in an effort to protect the interest of the AdWords advertisers. [from adsense-adclicks@google.com]His subsequent appeals to Adsense Support were also turned down.

John Q. Public is now looking for alternate revenue streams to monetize his blog and sends us the following questions:

Q 1: Can I get back my Adsense Account ?

There are fewcases when previously banned Adsense publishers managed to reinstate their Google account successfully with Google only deducting some amount related to invalid clicks.Thank you for clarifying your situation. We have reviewed your circumstances and have reinstated your account, effective immediately. Based on the findings of our investigati…

There are sometimes genuine reasons to unlock or crack a password protected PDF file. You have the legal right to open the encrypted PDF document but forgot the password like in the case below.

Say a former colleague created some critical sales reports in PDF format but he is not working with the company anymore. In his absence, you have no option but to crack the PDF password in order to open, read or print these PDF files.

Unlock the PDF Password
There are basically two types of PDF protection - the original PDF creator can either restrict opening the PDF file itself or he can restrict others from modifying, printing or copying text and graphics from the PDF file. Here are a few possible workarounds:

When there are Copying or Printing Restrictions on PDF

Say you want to print a couple of pages from the PDF document but the document settings won't let you do that.

DI Reader Techno Man is looking for a free software to convert rm to mp3 files which he can later transfer to his iPod or burn onto an Audio CD.

The most straightforward method is by using the RealPlayer itself. If the ra or rm file is linked directly on the website, just right click and choose "Save Target As" to save the real audio files to your hard drive.

Now open RealPlayer and choose Tools - CD - CD Burner to create an MP3 CD from your saved rm files. Later you can copy these MP3 files from the CD back to your hard drive or the iPod. [More on Real Player CD Burner here.]

Alternatively, you can try the RM to MP3 Converter from Jodix - it is a freeware can convert all Real Media formats (*.rm, *.ra, *.rmvb) to MP3 files. Switch from Swift Sound is also a possible solution.

The above techniques / software may not work for streaming real audio (like .ram) since they are buffered and not saved directly to the computer.

Want to use your desktop computer or laptop without leaving the bed ? Here are two solutions:

Ergopod computer station is probably an ideal solution for lazy geeks or even people who are bedridden for some reason and want to work on the computer for long hours. [via Neatorama]

The monitor platform can be rotated upto 55° and even supports multiple LCD Screens. Just ensure that the screws are tight enough else the heavy monitor might slip on the patient / user.

Another alternative is the portable Laptop bed table [aka Laptop Laidback] that are much cheaper and you can fit almost any notebook. It will even save your thighs from the heat originating from the laptop.

The Laptop Laidback stand can be used even while you are using the laptop on a sofa or a reclining chair.

Hooters recently presented their VIP card to Bill Gates of Microsoft and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. Now the duo can now walk inside any Hooters Restaurant worldwide to enjoy free food but they will still have to pay for the drinks.

Not sure if this free Hooter card will be of any use to these philanthropists but their group photo with the Hooters' Waitresses is quite interesting.

When Google introduced Gmail in 2004 with 1 GB of free storage, the GMail interface did not have a Delete button that could move email messages to trash with one click.

That was probably a wrong decision but it took almost two years for Google to add that "missing" Delete button to the GMail interface.

There's still no "official" GMail keyboard shortcut for deleting messages or moving them to trash (even Matt Cutts would like to see one.) You have to use the mouse to delete GMail messages, there's no way to delete GMail emails without taking the hand off your keyboard.

Or wait, there does exist a keyboard shortcut for deleting email messages in GMail though Google never told you about that "secret key" - it's called the "End" key that works perfect but only inside the Opera browser.

[Discovered this by accident when we hit the End key instead of the PageDown key and the email just disappeared with the message "The conversation ha…

Windows Vista official launch is just a week away and all new PCs will probably ship preloaded with Windows Vista now. So the most common question today is about application compatibility - will the existing software versions and games work the same with Windows Vista ?

Who would want to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista just to realize that some mission critical software aren't working anymore. It could be expensive software like AutoCAD 2007, 3DS Max 9, Adobe Photoshop CS2 or the smaller ones like Norton Antivirus, Nero, ZoneAlarm Firewall, Picasa, Tally or even iTunes.

While the best approach would be to directly talk with the software vendors, that may not be always possible. So here a couple of options to help you find what software works and what doesn't work with Windows Vista.

How to make sure that your software and games will work with Windows Vista

Using VMWare Virtual Machine

Get the free trial DVD of Windows Vista and install that as a guest OS using VMWare Wor…

Wikipedia doesn't want to become the playground of spammers so they implemented a major change today that makes their website less interesting to spammers.

Any URL on Wikipedia website that points to a location other than en.wikipedia.org is now stuffed with rel=nofollow tag meaning Wikipedia won't help bring any Google juice for your site.

So whether it's the CNN website or a PayPal phishing site or an illegal Viagra store, Wikipedia will have the same policy for all - we don't trust you so you get the rel=nofollow tag..

Now that's a worrying development. The search engines would believe that Wikipedia is the actual owner of the content and will rank their pages higher in organic listings even when the content was sourced from other "credible" sites like CNN, Engadget or even your mom's blog.

Let's illustrate with an example:

Say you discover a cool feature in the iPod (called Stylus) and blog about it. Tomorrow, the Wikipedia contributors append the…

Before we introduce this useful virtual camera called RumShot for your Windows desktop, take a look at the screenshot of our website above. It was created in a second without even having to press any key.

And if those 3 LCD screens don't impress you, here's another one that looks like a row of photographs with all the curls and shadows. Again, it took less than a second to create this image.

RumShot is a free screen capture software (just 200kb) that does two things in one go - it captures a part of your desktop and then adds beautiful borders around the screenshot just like a photoframe. You can experiment placing screenshots inside an iPod, PSP or even a Sony Mobile phone (they come as RumShot themes).

Rumshot won't act as replacement of your existing screen capture tool since it captures just a fixed dimension screenshot and auto enhances it with borders which is very much like adding layers inside Photoshop.

Recently received a surprise shipment from AMD - it contained an Oakley Vertical Computer Bag and two USB hubs (4 ports each) with an ethernet cable.

There's a card inside this bag from AMD promoting Windows Vista and says "Happy Holidays, We'll see you at CES 2007". [so the shipment was meant to reach us even before CES but it possibly got delayed enroute]

We never gave our address to AMD but the shipping label had the same address style / number as the one with Microsoft - hence the obvious connection between the Ferrari laptops shipped by Microsoft and the Oakley bag from AMD. And there's even mention of Windows Vista inside the bag.

Unlike the standard briefcase-style laptop bags, the one from Oakley is pretty light and the laptop slides vertically inside the bag. There are just too many compartments for storing the laptop accessories but here's the most interesting part about the bag:Travel documents fit in the convenient mesh pocket, and the shielded acc…

Click To PlayYou were probably introduced to speech recognition when Microsoft included a native voice-recognition system inside Office XP (and Windows XP SP1). The very idea of dictating Word documents and Outlook emails was exciting enough but you soon left, largely unimpressed, because there were just too many mistakes and you were spending more time in correcting the transcribed text instead of actual dictation.

Speaking into the microphone was therefore never considered a more productive activity than typing with the traditional keyboard. Things are, however, very different now [watch the video demo above]

Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 from Nuance may change your perception of speech recognition software forever - the software is amazingly accurate and works like a charm - all you need is a Windows XP/Vista computer with enough RAM, fast processorand few gigs of free hard disk space.

And yes, you also require a good Microphone but dont need to buy one separately as the speech software…

Microsoft customers will soon be able to download Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista directly from the Windows Marketplace website without having to wait for the installation DVDs to arrive in their mail.

But before you start your download engines, here's a rough idea about file sizes of Windows Vista and Office 2007 installers:

Do you subscribe to tons of RSS feeds ? Are there hundreds of unread items in your newsreader ? Do you end up spending more time inside the RSS reader than you would want to ?

If answer to any of the above questions is Yes, you are probably suffering from RIO [RSS Information Overload]. So here are some tips to beat the RSS stress and manage your RSS subscriptions more effectively.

Create Additional Levels of Hierarchy

We have a love-hate relationship with some RSS feeds - we sometimes like them and sometimes not.

Create a new folder [like "Pending Review" or "Under Scrutiny"] and move all such feeds in that folder. Every weekend, clean the folder by deleting feeds that do not interest you anymore. The cycle continues every week.

Create an A-list Folder containing Favorite Feeds

The A-list folder doesn't mean that it will contain feeds only from A-list bloggers - instead it will have feeds that you just can't afford to miss. That could mean your girlfriend's…

The corporate logo of Amazon.com has a very simple design - just the word amazon and a small yellow arrow.

Before we share the interesting story behind the logo design, let's play a quick quiz - try to guess the correct Amazon logo from these very similar designs. [hint: Amazon wants to provide every item on their online shopping store]

Well, the actual Amazon.com logo is the one on the bottom right corner. As you would have noticed, the logo has a yellow arrow between the first A and the Z letters.

The yellow arrow implies that they have everything from A to Z and also represents the smile on the customer's face. [Thanks Abhijit, Picture Credit: Guess The Logo]

Update: Peter Dawson has dissected the FedEx logo design and found a forward looking arrow embedded neatly between the letters "Ex".

Update: Ravi has compiled another good collection of corporate logos and their interesting backgrounds. The Microsoft logo has a slash between the o and s letters to emphasize the &…